Join us on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1 and Monday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2 as The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert brings you an all-Beethoven program from the 2024/2025 season, featuring the German master’s towering Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) and Symphony No. 4. The eminent pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who made his debut with the Philadelphians some 55 years ago, is the soloist in the concerto, and Russian maestro Tugan Sokhiev is on the podium.
Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his final piano concerto in 1809. By this time he was widely recognized as the greatest living composer in Europe – a renown propelled by his first six symphonies and by his first four piano concertos, which he had premiered as soloist. Beethoven was a formidable virtuoso, and made a great case for his masterful concertos. But his growing deafness had forced him to retire from public piano performances by the time he finished his fifth concerto, which would be the only one of his piano concertos that he did not introduce himself. It is the largest in scale and introduces a number of fascinating innovations. “The Emperor is the most extroverted and most brilliant of the five concertos,” notes Garrick Ohlsson. “It's a fabulous, it's a beautiful piece. It also contains, as all Beethoven does, the seeds of what happens in music in the future.” Ohlsson adds that under the surface of the mighty Fifth Concerto in E-flat major, one can hear the orchestra growing in size and the piano itself expanding in sonority and depth. Beethoven never saw or heard a piano as large as the modern concert grand, or an orchestra as mighty as today’s symphonic ensembles. He certainly never imagined a concert hall approaching the size of the venues we know now. And yet, says Ohlsson, Beethoven’s music perfectly suits them all.
This all-Beethoven performance concludes with the Fourth Symphony in B-flat major, composed three years before the “Emperor” Concerto, in 1806. The Fourth is perhaps Beethoven’s most overshadowed symphony. It’s almost a cliche to refer to the volcanic brilliance of the composer’s Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies, but it can’t be denied that they get the lion’s share of attention from audiences today. When we consider the startling innovations of the Eroica that preceded it, the Fourth seems almost a throwback to the classical era. And yet Beethoven’s contemporaries seemed just as bewildered by the Fourth as by the Third. Here’s a quote from one critic of the time: “To me the great master seems here, as in several of his recent works, now and then excessively bizarre, and thus, even for knowledgeable friends of art, easily incomprehensible and forbidding.” We can hear an example of what this critic might have found “bizarre” just a few bars into the opening of the symphony. During the slow introduction, dissonances build up as the music migrates through several unrelated keys before settling into its home key of B-flat major. This doesn’t seem unusual to us today – after all, through repetition we are deeply familiar with even the most adventurous of Beethoven’s musical ideas. But it reminds us that even in a work we prize for its approachability, Beethoven couldn’t help pushing boundaries in ways that startled and challenged those around him.
PROGRAM:
Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Tugan Sokhiev, conductor
Garrick Ohlsson, piano
WRTI PRODUCTION TEAM:
Melinda Whiting: Host
Alex Ariff: Senior Producer and Broadcast Engineer
Listen to The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert broadcasts, every Sunday at 1 p.m. on WRTI 90.1, streaming at WRTI.org, on the WRTI mobile app, and on your smart speaker. Listen again on Mondays at 7 p.m. on WRTI HD-2. Listen for up to two weeks after broadcast on WRTI Replay or by scrolling down the home page at WRTI.org to Philadelphia Orchestra In Concert On Demand.
